The United States currently has the world's largest postal system, which handles billions of pieces of mail each year. The servicing of mail delivery involves three general steps: collection, sorting, and delivery. Collection takes place through a series of post office facilities spread throughout the United States. Postal employees typically take mail pieces from the mailboxes to the nearest local office where the mail pieces are accumulated for the sorting procedure. At the post office, postal clerks segregate mail by size and class into separate categories. The mail is then sent from local post offices to central facilities known as sectional centers. At the sectional centers, high speed automated equipment sorts large volumes of mail.
During sortation, a zip mail translator sorts the postmarked letters according to their destination post office. Postal workers sort the mail by region and then send each letter to one of several bins. Each bin contains the mail of a predetermined postal destination. The mail is then transported to the destination specified by each bin. At the local offices the mail is again sorted for the area served by the local office into bundles for each delivery route.
Cost of maintaining and supporting sorting services at the central post office facilities, even with the implementation of automated equipment, has become staggering. It has been projected that the volume of mail passing through the central post office facilities will increase, and accordingly, the associated sorting service fees will also increase.
Rapidly advancing postal rates place increased burdens on both the user and the postal service required to support such volumes of mail. In order to prompt customers to assist the postal service with their enormous task, the postal service has offered discounts in rates to high volume users, providing the users comply with certain requirements. These requirements have been instituted in an effort to improve efficiency and reduce processing time required of the central facilities.
Postal discounts are allocated for several aspects of mail piece work sharing. The requirements the user must comply with in order to qualify for the postal discounts are set forth by the United States Postal Service's Domestic Mail Manual. Such discounts are provided to users who presort their mail for easy processing by the postal authority.
In order for the user to gain the benefit of the work sharing process and qualify for postal discounts without significantly increasing their workload, postal mail processing programs have been created. Postal discounts are provided for example, for sorting mail based on the address information such as the mail piece zip code and the like.
Systems relating to work sharing features are discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,051,914 to Sansone et al. (hereinafter referred to as "SANSONE 1") for Optimizing Mail Delivery Systems by Merging Mailings, U.S. Pat. No. 5,008,827 to Sansone et al. (hereinafter referred to as "SANSONE 2") for a Central Postage Data Communications Network and U.S. Pat. No. 5,005,124 to Connell et al. (hereinafter referred to as "CONNELL") for Method and Apparatus for Categorizing and Certifying Mail. These patents relate to the concept of certain limited user services and data sharing, but do not encompass the full range of work sharing. For example, SANSONE 1 discloses a system for optimizing mail delivery of a batch of mail by interconnecting a plurality of batch mailers and enabling the merging of mail batches to achieve postal discounts. SANSONE 2 discloses a communications system for work sharing between participants, as well as self-contained automated processing facilities relative to specific postal service requirements for postal discounts. CONNELL discloses an apparatus and method for categorizing and certifying mail to allow the postal service to eliminate its manual acceptance procedures, thus reducing postal service employee workload.
Another prior art system, in which postal discounts are provided based upon the work-sharing concept, is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,475,603 to Korowotny for an Apparatus and Method for Mail Qualification and Traying. This invention describes providing dual sliding windows for the purpose of determining postage discount qualifications across invalid and unreadable mail pieces and determining the number of mail pieces to be placed in a mail tray, for receiving the maximum postage discount as based upon mail piece weight.
The above mentioned prior art systems do not use an accurate mail piece measurement to be included as a parameter in a presort program in determining the number of mail pieces to be included in a mail tray for receiving maximum postage discounts.
Typical prior art mail processing systems include: a data base management system; an address cleansing system; a presort program; and, an output system. The data base system includes information that describes the address corresponding to the mail piece. Address cleansing is well known in the art of mail processing and thus, a detail description is not necessary for an understanding of the present invention.
Presort programs generally sort mail based on a set of parameters determined by the user. Presort is accomplished prior to delivering the mail piece to the post office. The presort parameters include, but are not limited to, the size of the mail piece, the class of the mail piece, the type of mail being delivered, and the payment method for the mail piece. Another such postal discount is provided for mail pieces that have been sorted into postal trays according to the thickness of the mail piece.
In prior art systems, the user determines the thickness of a mail piece by manually measuring one piece of mail and entering that measurement into a mail processing system. Inaccuracies due to human error during the manual measurement of the mail pieces have been a common problem with these prior art systems. The inaccuracies of mail piece measurement often result in air trays and/or over-filled trays. Air trays are trays that do not meet the requirement of "filled" as set forth in the Domestic Mail Manual, and thus, do not qualify for postal discounts. Overfilled trays are trays that are filled above capacity, thus unjustly qualifying a mail piece for postal discounts. In these situations, either the user does not receive the benefit of their work sharing efforts, or the post office does not receive the proper postal payment. As well, these inaccuracies require both the user and the post office to expend significant time and money correcting the results of the measurement errors.
In order to comply with the requirements set forth in the Domestic Mail Manual of the Postal Service the user is left with a high burden. Therefore, the customer's internal sorting process, specifically, the mail piece thickness measurement, must be executed in a manner that will permit the user to realize substantial savings in response to the increase in workload.